In 2017, 70 percent of low-income households in America had some kind of civil legal problem, ranging from divorce to a housing dispute, according to the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation. But in the civil system, there is no guaranteed right to representation. That means families living near the poverty line handle the vast majority of those cases — 86 percent — with little or no professional legal help to guide them.
This civil legal system “crisis”, as advocates call it, has sent states scrambling for solutions. Washington has taken the unusual approach of creating an entirely new legal position, one that can help clients with straightforward legal problems for a fraction of the cost. The new “legal technicians”, the first of whom were licensed in 2015, go beyond a paralegal and don’t need a lawyer’s oversight to offer legal advice. They are to the legal field what a nurse practitioner is to medicine, a triage model that may soon expand to several other states.
Attorney Steve Crossland, former president of the Washington State Bar Association, hoped creating something like a legal technician would cut down on the fake lawyers and “notarios” who were selling cheap divorces, wills and other legal contracts with no expertise. Crossland saw a huge need for more affordable legal help that was still subject to government oversight.
[For more on this story by CHRISTIE THOMPSON, go to https://www.themarshallproject...an-t-afford-a-lawyer]
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